Ethan Thornton

speaker

1,249 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 4 Aug

Ethan Thornton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe · 497: Ethan Thornton—I Like a Lotta Problems · 4 Aug 2026 podcast

And I think that has been the track of American democracy for the last 250 years.

You really have to track the climate here, not the weather, because you can swing wildly up and down

But generally, it has been a massive success story of a group of people governing themselves and having extreme agency on fixing and ideally looking ahead to preemptively fix a lot of the problems we're facing.

So, yes, I have like significant concerns about the future.

But I think it's important to balance that with the fact that I believe very, very deeply in representative democracy and in capitalism to be the best system to solve those problems.

Now, I think talking through the problems I'm concerned about, one is near-peer competition with China.

I think I've discussed that at length.

I think second one is the invention of machine intelligence.

And of course, there's the LLM perspective here.

There's the physical intelligence perspective here.

We as a company, through autonomous warfare systems, play in this world.

You see democracy be stressed when there's great power competition.

You see democracy be stressed incredibly whenever there's radical technological change.

What was the first one you called peer what?

Great power competition with China and near-peer warfare.

What's it mean?

Yeah, absolutely.

It basically means another country existing that you are generally somewhat adversarial to that has similar powers to your own.

And so we haven't had this since the 90s.

Soviet Union was one.

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